The present invention is directed to a method and apparatus for obtaining access to a numerical IP address.
The Internet can link your computer to any other computer connected to the Internet. The reason the Internet works is that every computer connected to it uses the same set of rules and procedures (known as protocols) to control timing and data format. The set of commands and timing specifications used by the Internet is called Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, universally abbreviated as TCP/IP.
The TCP/IP protocols include the specifications that identify individual computers and exchange data between computers.
Most computers are connected to local networks that connect through gateways to the Internet backbone. The core of the Internet is the set of backbone connections that tie the local networks together and the routing scheme that controls the way each piece of data finds its destination.
The Internet and its applications (e.g. www, e-mail, file transfer protocol) use an addressing system called the Domain Name System. This system translates a character string such as “jones.com” into an IP address which is the actual address to a network resource. This is either a 32-bit numeric string or 128-bit hexadecimal string, depending on IP version. While it is possible to address a resource directly with a combination of protocol type and address, the Domain Name System was devised to provide an intuitive addressing scheme. The “.com” level is called the Top Level Domain or TLD. The name before the TLD, in this case “jones”, in the example would represent a Second Level Domain or SLD. The term “domain name” is generally understood to be the combination of a TLD and a SLD. This is considered, for the purposes of the present patent application, as the conventional Domain Name System. Second level domains such as .co.uk and .com.au function as top level domains within their respective country code Top Level Domains and should be considered as such.
Internet activity can be defined as computers communicating with other computers using TCP/IP. The computer that originates a transaction must identify its intended destination with a unique address. Every computer on the Internet has an Internet Protocol address, or IP address, which contains routing information that identifies its location.
It is much easier to remember and use the domain name than to type in the IP address. The Domain Name System and its ability to address a resource “by name” become even more important as Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) comes into use, since the addresses in IPv6 are longer. Computers have no trouble working with big strings of numbers like this, but humans are not so skilled. Therefore, most computers on the Internet (except the ones used exclusively for internal routing and switching) also have a host name, which is part of the Domain Name System (DNS). A host name is an address that uses words instead of numbers.
The Domain Name System is composed of a number of Top Level Domains. Fully qualified DNS names generally have an individual host name, followed by a top level domain name for a computer connected to the Internet that generally identifies the type of institution that uses the address, such as .com for commercial businesses or .edu for schools, colleges and universities. The University of Washington's DNS domain name is washington.edu, Microsoft's is microsoft.com.
Within the United States, the last letters of the domain name usually tell what type of institution owns the computer. Some large institutions and big corporations divide their domain addresses into sub-domains. You might even see some sub-domains broken into sub-sub-domains.
Top Level Domains can also identify the country in which the system is located, such as .ca for Canada or .fr for France. Sometimes, a geographic domain name will also include a sub-domain that identifies the district within the larger domain.
This is the basic model for translating a domain name to an IP address: a client application such as a web browser on a user's computer sends a domain name request through the network to the closest domain name server or resolver, a computer which acts as a shared storage resource to match a domain name with its IP address. If the closest domain name server does not have this information, it forwards the request upstream to a more central name server until the correct match is made, or a “not found” error message is returned. The name server returns the IP address which is then used through the network to contact the computer having that particular IP address.
The domain name system for TLD's has been handed over by the US Government to ICANN—the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers—which has begun approving the addition of new Top Level Domains (TLD's). National committees normally handle national Top Level Domains and national domain structures may differ from one another. For example, a commercial domain in Korea is registered as “xxx.co.kr′” while an Australian registration would use the format “xxx.com.au” but Sweden has no special designation. Companies are registered as “xxx.se”. In each case, the ‘xxx’ must be unique within each domain and can represent a variable number of letters and/or numbers, and may include a hyphen.
The Domain Name System was created when the Internet was still young and (relatively) small, and when only a few major corporations and major universities were expected to have Internet connections. This ‘few-user’ bias is shown in other ways by the use of .gov to indicate only the United States government and .mil to designate only the United States military establishment. There was no TLD defined for individuals, although one has been opened recently as “.name”.
Within each TLD or national domain there may be no more than one second level domain combined with the TLD such as ‘jones.com’ or ‘jones.net’ and allocation of these names normally has been on a first come, first served basis. People and companies have been allowed to register any name and any number of names, including generic descriptions, as long as these names have not already been registered by someone else. Many violations of trademark and other property rights have been claimed. Registered names have been given Intellectual Property Right status, giving the owner exclusive, international rights to use that name as an identity in the Internet. The .com and national domains, and several of the new TLD's such as .biz and .name are the ones potentially most impacted by the need for ‘exclusivity’. Despite the addition of new TLD's, the .com top level has maintained its status as the de facto standard for business and commercial use. Many companies consider it a commercial imperative to have their names registered under the .com TLD. Although two or more people or companies may have equally legitimate rights to a name, only one per TLD is allowed to use it on the Internet. An example is Apple, which may be the music publishing company founded by the Beatles, or the computer company founded by Steve Jobs, or maybe some organic produce company. Only one can identify itself as “apple.com”. There are at least 5 companies named Amazon in New York City. There are approximately 100 companies in California named “Great Wall”. Only one company on the Internet can identify itself as “plumber.com”, giving that company exclusive international rights to identify itself with the generic term.
There are also examples of misrepresentation and “namenapping” or “cybersquatting”. The supply of available, appropriate names, especially within the .com TLD, has rapidly diminished, leading to defensive registrations and an expensive secondary (speculative) market in domain names.
The situation is patently unfair and contrary to previous International Property Rights concepts. Unlike the telephone system, which is inclusive and based on all-to-all communication, the Internet is exclusive with a ‘landed gentry’ owning the right to create and distribute information under their recognized names. The populace, both as individuals and as society in general, would be better served by the communications technology of the Internet if these problems were resolved.
The above general information concerning the Internet was taken in part from COMPUTING FUNDAMENTALS, Second Edition, pages 295 to 297 by Peter Norton, published by Glencoe McGraw-Hill (1987).
As outlined above, a problem with the Internet is that each domain name (individual name plus top level domain) is unique, and duplicates are not allowed. Various companies have the same name, sometimes on the same type or goods or services, but only the first company that registers on a top level domain is allowed to use that name, giving that particular company a monopoly on a name. The same is true with Trademarked goods. The same Trademark is used by different companies, sometimes on the same types of goods, but at different locations, but only the first company to register the name on a domain is allowed to use the Trademark as a domain name. This makes finding a company by its name or the name of the product that it produces or the service that it provides difficult using domain names.
INTERNET ONE of the British Indian Ocean Territory has a practice, which is even more monopolistic against residents of the territory than the other national Internet organizations. Residents are forced to register as “name”.com.io, a third level domain. Other registrants are allowed to register domain names on a first come, first registered basis, with a sub-directory of non .io domain names replacing the first registration for duplicate names. The sub-directory for non .io names contains the domain name and the non .io IP address of each registrant in the sub-directory. Also, the registration of duplicate names is restricted. For example “Spicegirls.io” is limited to one registration.
One system similar to INTERNET ONE is New.net <http://www.new.net>-a private company using a proprietary solution for providing additional top domains not sanctioned by ICANN. They create additional, fictive TLD's by using the format: name.new_domain.{new.net}. For example they would allow you to register as ‘favre.law’ but then require users to either 1) reach you through a cooperating ISP or 2) add ‘plug-in’ software to their web browser. Otherwise you would see the real registration: favre.law.new.net. The improvement over INTERNET ONE is that New Net has software that suppresses (hides) the ‘new.net’ domain name.
Intellectual Property and Privacy Issues on the Internet, McDonald et al. JPOS, p. 47 (Jan. 1997) discloses, “Some commentators have suggested providing “sub-domains” within the “.com” system for types of goods and services or by geographic area, in a manner akin to Yellow Page Listings.-----However, developments do not appear imminent,----”.
Along the same lines is: A SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM? TRADEMARK INFRINGEMENT AND DILUTION BY DOMAIN NAMES: BRINGING THE CYBERWORLD IN LINE WITH THE “REAL” WORLD, Jennifer R. Dupre, Vol. 87 TMR, pps, 629-637. Dupre proposes a system of replacing a domain name with a sub-directory as soon as a request for a registration of a duplicate of the domain name is filed. If implemented, this could be considered an encroachment on the exclusive rights of the owner of the domain name, particularly if the owner of the domain name also owns a trademark in the domain name. It also introduces the problem that content must be moved from one domain name to another after it has been published and perhaps advertised and indexed by search engines.
GATEWAY PAGES: A SOLUTION TO THE DOMAIN NAME CONFLICT? by Puneet Singh, Vol. 91 TMR, p. 1234 discloses “If more than one party sought to register the identical domain name, a directory would be created for that specific domain name, and that domain name would no longer be unique.” The directory, in reality, would be a sub-directory under the TLD directory.
A PROPOSAL FOR THE REGISTRATION OF DOMAIN NAMES, Michael A. Sartori, Vol. 87 TMR, p. 638, 653-656 at page 638 discloses a system “----based on the premise of eliminating the uniqueness of domain names”. INTERNATIONALIZING DOMAIN NAMES IN APPLICATIONS (IDNA)—RFC 3490 by Internet Engineering Task Force Network Working Group members P. Faltstrom, P. Hoffman and A. Costello. Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2003), the disclosure of which is hereby incorporated by reference. The following is a quotation. “Abstract: Until now, there has been no standard method for domain names to use characters outside the ASCII repertoire. This document defines internationalized domain names (IDN's) and a mechanism called Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) for handling them in a standard fashion. IDN's use characters drawn from a large repertoire (Unicode), but IDNA allows the non-ASCII characters to be represented using only the ASCII characters already allowed in so-called host names today. This backward-compatible representation is required in existing protocols like DNS, so that IDN's can be introduced with no changes to the existing infrastructure. IDNA is only meant for processing domain names, not free text.”
The Internet address to the full procedure is:                http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3490.txt?number=3490        